Wild Capitalism_ Environmental Activism and Postsocialist Politic

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INTRODUCTION*

This is a book about people seeking social change, during a period of social

change of historical proportions. The historical change in question is Hungary’s

transformation from state socialism--part of the larger process of globalization. Over the

course of the transformation from state socialism, Hungarian environmental activists

produced and mobilized new environmental discourses articulating a new cultural and

political logic: post-socialist political ecology. In a diverse array of issues and

campaigns, environmentalists criticize rising social and economic inequalities, the

proliferation of environmental risks and global consumerism, and limited access to

political participation.

Having experienced the degradation of human health and the environment under

both socialist and capitalist regimes, contemporary environmentalists express strong

skepticism toward both systems. Post-socialist activists question the industrialist

orientation and concepts of progress shared by state socialism and industrial capitalism.

Hungary’s environmental dissidents of the 1980s attacked the state’s scientific

bureaucracies and criticized central planning. They demanded institutional

accountability, arguing for freedom of information, more transparent bureaucracies, and

public participation in planning decisions. Environmental activists’ continuing vision of

grassroots democracy traces its roots to their critique of state socialism. Their emerging

concerns about environmental inequalities, however, stem from a growing awareness that

integration into the global economy made post-socialist countries vulnerable to

environmental degradation and other risks in new ways. Environmentalists demand

* Pre-publication version; for published version with complete bibliographic references, please see

Harper, Krista (2006) Wild Capitalism: Environmental Activism and Postsocialist Political Ecology in Hungary ,East European Monographs/Columbia University Press.



alternative pathways to economic development, and they struggle to make their

perspective heard in an environment where neo-liberal models of progress have gained

hegemony.

This evolving perspective on the global economy marks a shift, not only in the

issues environmentalists chose to work on, but also in the way activists imagine power

relations. While dissident environmentalists imagined themselves as society organizing

itself against the party-state, many Hungarian activists came to identify themselves as

part of a global social current running against waves of multinational capitalist

expansion. In this vision, environmental activism protects the post-socialist state from its

own weakness by shoring up citizens’ opposition to potentially harmful development

plans. Whether operating in a socialist dictatorship or a capitalist democracy, Hungarian

environmentalists see their role in demanding, publicizing, and even creating scientific

information and ethical arguments that challenge the status quo.

Environmental dissidents of the 1980s imagined a utopia of grassroots public

participation, freedom of information, and self-organizing communities and small

businesses. Hungarian activists of the 1990s retained these ideals, but the realities of the

post-socialist transformation rendered them skeptical of the ecological modernization

model proposed by advocates of global marketization (Hajer 1995). Now that Hungary

has moved from the first decade of post-socialism into the nation’s first decade as a

member state of the European Union, environmentalists continue to fight for participation

in the policymaking process. Wild Capitalism interrogates how the meanings of

“environment,” “citizenship,” and “civil society” have changed as environmentalists

reinvent themselves as part of the imagined community of international

environmentalism and grassroots globalization.



In the pages that follow, I outline methodological and theoretical strategies for

understanding the emerging post-socialist political ecology of East-Central Europe. I

explore the contributions of ethnography to scholarship on environmental movements and

post-socialist transformations, drawing upon my experience of field research in urban

Hungary. Environmental and anti-nuclear movements played a significant role in 1980s

dissident movements in Poland, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic states

as well as in Hungary (Dawson 1996, Jancar-Webster 1998, Nahaylo 1999, Pavlínek and

Pickles 2000, Snajdr 1998). I choose to focus on Hungary’s environmental movement

because it mobilized large numbers of participants in the 1980s, offered a particularly

trenchant critique of Soviet-era industrialization, and maintained a consistently active

political presence in the years following the political transformations of 1989. I trace the

trajectory of environmental activism, from its roots in 1980s dissidence, to the

“environmental transition” following 1989, through contemporary environmentalists’

increasing integration into networks and discourses of “grassroots globalization.”

Hungary’s historical transformation presents a window onto the changing political

ecology of industrial societies following the Cold War and the collapse of “actually

existing socialism”—a shift I call “post-socialist political ecology.” Environmental

activists act as “revealers” of this emergent paradigm (Melucci 1992), making explicit the

connections between democratic practice, changing social identities, and the political

economy of the environment. Finally, I provide a chapter-by-chapter preview of the

book.

Ethnography and Environmentalism: In the Field in the Street

The first time I lived in Budapest, in fall 1993, I met the members of Zöld Nôk

(“Green Women”), Hungary’s only eco-feminist group. The Green Women introduced



me to Hungary’s environmental health problems, feminist issues, and the 1980s

oppositionist scene. They had gotten to know one another during the Danube

demonstrations of 1988, and they regaled me in stories about the Danube movement.

When I returned home, I planned on doing more research on Danube activism.

When I returned in the summer of 1995, however, few environmentalists were

interested in discussing the Danube. Some environmentalists were weary of the

glorification of the Danube movement and its personalities. In the early 1990s, hundreds

of small, grassroots environmental groups were forming outside the capital city, and

groups in Budapest were turning their attention to new problems of consumer waste and

suburbanization. Even those who had been active in the Danube movement were

experiencing combat fatigue. In 1995, Hungarian environmental groups were working on

diverse environmental issues and fretting about what to do when their initial five-year

seed grants all expired at once. Discouraged on the Danube front, I determined to study

Hungarian environmentalism as it transformed into a post-socialist social movement.

In August 1995, people all over the world gathered in demonstrations against

French nuclear testing in the South Pacific. The Hungarian action against nuclear testing

at Mururoa, organized by a fledgling Greenpeace chapter and some members of the Clean

Air Group., was my introduction to participant-observation in a social movement setting.

Held in the middle of summer vacation, the protest drew less than a dozen of protesters,

and I was quickly enlisted to hold up a large banner we marched from the French

embassy steps to the posh downtown storefronts of Christian Dior and Air France on

Váci Street. The action was covered in several national newspapers, along with a photo

of me holding a bedsheet emblazoned with the slogan, “Éljen Chirac—Mururoán!”

(“Long live Chirac--in Mururoa!”) while attempting to take fieldnotes (Figure 1).



Although the Mururoa action was considered somewhat of a flop within the

environmental movement, it propelled me into a wider network of activists.

Ethnographic research offers the opportunity to ground knowledge in place, but

the selection of that “place” is a complex process that shapes the path of what follows

(Gupta and Ferguson 1997). By the time of the Mururoa demonstration, I already knew a

handful of activists from Hungary’s environmental movement. In the weeks that

followed, I worked on finding a home within the movement. Budapest offered the best

prospects for keeping track of local, national, and international environmental issues, but

I also wanted to get to know environmental groups outside the capital city. For many

weeks, I attended the civil organization afternoons at the Eco-Service office, an

environmental information clearinghouse in downtown Budapest. On those afternoons,

Eco-Service offered free photocopying to local grassroots activists as a way of fostering

informal networking, and I was able to meet a variety of people from smaller

organizations in Budapest.

In the end, I relied on my acquaintances from Green Women and the Clean Air

Group to get settled in my research site. I helped the Clean Air Group gather signatures

for a petition on public transportation at street fairs and a summer music festival, and I

attended a few meetings. Through these contacts, I finally found my research home in

the ELTE Klub, now known as ETK, a student environmental group at Eötvös Loránd

University in Budapest. I had met several of the group’s members in a human ecology

course at the university and through Clean Air Group events. The members were

friendly, and many of them were curious about environmentalism in the United States.

The group, active since the early 1980s, was well integrated into the national

environmental movement. ELTE Klub’s newsletter, the Gaia Press Review, harnessed



the members’ impressive language skills to translating environmental articles from

German and English.

Perhaps most important for the purposes of my research project, ELTE Klub was

relatively free of old antagonisms between members and between other environmental

groups. One member told me, “We try to be the ‘good children’ of the movement and get

along with everyone.” Indeed, ELTE Klub had working relationships with nature

protection groups, old dissident environmental groups, peace activists, religious

organizations, and international environmental NGOs. ELTE Klub’s ability to network

with a wide range of groups allowed me to get to know many different parts of the

movement without having to negotiate old conflicts.

Beginning in December 1995, I participated in the weekly meetings of the ELTE

Klub, as well as the group’s demonstrations and social events. I made a regular practice

of doing the rounds, dropping by the offices of environmental organizations to learn

about upcoming events, chat with activists, and pick up flyers and information. I

participated frequently in the activities of several other Budapest environmental groups,

including Bokor Eco-Group, Clean Air Group, Danube Circle, and the Green Circle of

the Budapest Technical University.

I attended national-level meetings, press releases, planning sessions,

demonstrations, and social events regularly. I went to conferences and training sessions

given by environmental groups on a range of topics. I traveled to three annual meetings

of the Hungarian environmental movement where representatives of activist groups from

all over the country discussed national strategies. At these meetings, I made contacts with

activists in the countryside whom I later visited for interviews. To gain a better

understanding of how Hungarian activists fit into the larger world of international



environmentalism, I accompanied an ELTE Klub member to an international congress on

sustainable development and social justice in Amsterdam in June 1997.1

In addition to my work with activists, I gained an understanding of how

environmentalists’ views overlap and conflict with those of Hungarians at large through

mass media, popular culture, and daily interactions with non-environmentalists. When

new acquaintances asked me why I had come to live in Hungary, I told them about my

research, and they almost always responded with their opinions on environmentalism. I

also got to know activists from the feminist, peace, and Roma (Gypsy) civil rights

movements, all of whom offered their views on the strengths and weaknesses of the

environmentalist world-view.

I used several methods to develop a picture of environmental activism as a perspective

and a set of practices—collecting activist life histories, conducting interviews,

participating in the everyday activities of environmentalist groups, and observing debates

and demonstrations. Since I was concerned with transformations and continuities in

environmental activism over the course of the transition, I often used a methodological

strategy of tracking an issue or activist through time. I also looked for issues that

activists perceived as completely novel, like consumption and advertising. In some

cases, I paid attention to groups, people, and discourses that were considered external or

marginal to the environmentalist cause, such as animal rights and peace organizations.

By looking at unexpected alignments of activists and issues, I sought to comprehend how

environmentalism takes shape in specific cultural and political contexts.

From the Danube to the Global: The Trajectory of Hungarian Environmentalism

Although environmentalism is a global social movement, the meaning of

environmental politics is constructed at the level of local practice, as activists creatively



translate environmental issues into novel cultural idioms and political processes.

Hungary’s environmental movement emerged at a time when the peaceful revolutions of

1989 were as yet unimaginable, but when frustration with the socialist state was growing

among the general public. The 1980s movement against the damming of the Danube

River, while ostensibly a single issue mobilization, launched a multivalent critique of the

state’s “nature regime” (Gille 1997). In the wake of the political and economic

transformation from state socialism, environmentalists confronted the renewed power of

market forces. The 1990s witnessed a concomitant shift in environmentalist framing of

issues and strategies. Toward the end of the decade, activists developed an awareness of

the limitations of a capitalist nature regime and increasingly framed local and place-based

issues in global context. Tracking environmentalism’s trajectory from Danube

dissidence, through the experience of the post-socialist “environmental transistion” and

“wild capitalism,” to its intersection with the “grassroots globalization” of contemporary

international social movement networks, I trace a genealogy of post-socialist political

ecology as it has emerged in Hungary.

Danube Dissidence and Beyond

When asked how the Hungarian environmental movement started, most

environmentalists mention the 1980s movement against the damming of the Danube

River as a key point of origin. Many Hungarians describe the mass demonstrations of

1988 against the damming of the Danube River at Nagymaros as a turning point for the

political opposition to the government, when changing the state socialist system seemed

to be an attainable goal after over thirty years of discouragement.

The Danube Circle, an underground environmental organization, emerged in the

early 1980s as a result of a series of debates about the damming of the Danube. While



government engineers presented the case as a simple issue of technological know-how,

journalist János Vargha wrote a number of articles on dissenting scientific opinions about

the project. The Danube Circle coalesced around a small group of journalists, social

scientists, artists, and natural scientists that opposed the damming of the Danube River at

Nagymaros, 50 kilometers north of Budapest. The Danube Circle gathered a wide

following as the Danube issue became a focus point for the political opposition to the

state socialist government.

The Danube Circle found a symbolically rich site in the opposition to the

damming of the Danube. The Danube movement, while focused on a single, seemingly

narrow issue, opened a critique of the state socialist system which called for greater

access to information and participation in decision-making and challenged the system’s

centrally planned economy on ecological, aesthetic, and cultural grounds. Underground

newspapers, discussion circles, and demonstrations against the dam system created a

space for debate and criticism of the government. Looking back, many participants in the

Danube movement characterize their 1980s activism as their introduction to “civil

society.”

Early in my fieldwork, I learned firsthand how the Danube cause came to

represent and legitimize environmental protest. When I joined Budapest activists in their

demonstration against French atomic testing, an old woman stopped and confronted one

of them: “Why don’t you pick an issue closer to Hungary? I liked you environmentalists

better when you had a real cause, when you were fighting for the Danube!” Her response

reflected the extent to which many Hungarians associated environmentalism with

narratives of democratization, drawing upon heroic stories of the oppositionist activism

of the Danube Circle, a theme to which I return in the next chapter and throughout this



book. The multivalence of the Danube cause, with its patriotic evocation of the cultural

heritage and natural splendor of the Danube landscape and its claims toward citizen

participation in planning and decision-making, appealed to both nationalist and

progressive strands of Hungarian political culture. Most people I met, from cab drivers to

students to vendors at the flea market, mentioned the Danube movement as an important

and respected environmental cause.

In this context, the movements of the 1990s seemed for a time to be less

organized, less focused, and less potent (Vári and Tamás 1993, Jancar-Webster 1998).

Although activists in the 1990s often deplored the small size of the environmental

movement and spoke wistfully of the Green heyday of the late 1980s when

demonstrations could mobilize thousands, the Hungarian environmental movement

remained one of the largest and most influential social movements in Hungary. While

activism in Budapest cooled off after 1989, there was an explosion of new groups in the

countryside and in smaller cities that contributed new voices and issues to the national

movement.

During the 1990s the number of registered groups grew steadily at a rate of

approximately 30 new groups annually (Regional Environmental Center 1997: 48). With

726 environmental NGOs active in 1994, Hungary had the largest environmental

movement in East-Central Europe, and this number did not reflect the several hundred

local chapters within the Hungarian Nature Protectors’ Association and the Hungarian

Ornithological Association (Regional Environmental Center 1997: 13). Although the

number of registered groups is not always an accurate indicator of collective action on the

ground, clearly, environmentalism has become an important area of political action.



In the 1990s roughly two-thirds of the organizations were in small towns with the

remaining groups in Budapest and other large cities (Regional Environmental Center

1997: 48). Hundreds of activists communicated with one another on the Zöld Pók

(“Green Spider”) computer network and exchange information on the Green Spider’s

bulletin boards. Green Spider contributed considerably to the ability of groups in the

countryside to exchange information and participate in nationwide debates, despite their

physical distance from Budapest. In addition to environmental groups, several peace,

social justice, and feminist groups also communicated via Green Spider. Activists

participated in lively online debates, and often people would discuss these exchanges

while waiting for a meeting to begin or while conversing over beers. Online and face-to-

face, they began to link together the disparate environmental problems faced by activists

in the countryside, cities, and the global environmental movement more broadly.

Environmental transitions2 and “wild capitalism”

Environmental activists who came of age protesting the socialist state laid the

blame for environmental problems on the absence of democratic public participation and

the socialist ideology of productivism (Persanyi 1993, Fisher 1993). In the years

immediately following the political changes of 1989, policymakers’ understanding of

environmental problems drew from this dissident account but added a new solution to the

problem: the global market. In his 1990 address at the opening of the Regional

Environmental Center in Budapest, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s director,

William K. Reilly, stated the following:

The lifting of the Iron Curtain has revealed to the world that authoritarian,

centrally planned societies are much greater threats to the environment than

capitalist democracies. The same policies that ravaged the environment—the



pursuit of all-out, no-holds barred economic development, without regard for

either human or natural resources—also wrecked the economy. (Reilly 1990: 2)

Reilly’s characterization of the environmental issue is an example of the Cold War

triumphalism of the times, when Western experts and Eastern elites promised that the

market would provide the strong medicine required to cure socialism’s many ills.

Marketization and foreign investment, in this view, would provide the “engine” for

environmental progress by making capital available for investments in new

environmental technologies from the West.

In fact, policy representations of state socialism as ecological villain and capitalist

democracy as environmental savior proved somewhat inaccurate. To be sure, the central

planners of the socialist economy externalized environmental burdens of industrial

production onto citizens (Gille 2002). Planners’ vision of catching up with (and even

surpassing) the capitalist West’s economic growth led to the creation of some of the most

polluted landscapes on earth—environmental “hotspots” that continue to harm the health

and economic opportunities of the people who live nearby (Feshbach and Friendly 1992,

Carter and Turnock 1993).

Ten years after Reilly’s statement, however, the processes of privatization and

marketization have not resulted in an unqualified environmental success story. In many

cases post-socialist governments shunted aside environmental concerns as they attracted

foreign investment with pollution waivers (Clapp 2001, Pávlinek and Pickles 2000).

Research suggests that the most environmentally innovative firms in Hungary were

typically state-owned companies producing exports, and Western companies, contrary to

earlier predictions, did not tend to develop new environmental technologies or products

(Zsolnai 1998).



Images of natural order feature prominently in post-socialist political

development discourses on social order. The symbolic process of “naturalization,” as

feminist scholars have observed, legitimizes social and economic power relationships as

foundational truths (Yanagisako and Delaney 1995: 5). In contemporary representations

of East-Central Europe, the binary opposition between “nature” and “culture”

corresponds to the “capitalist”/”socialist” binary (Verdery 1996: 78).

In the market triumphalist discourse that emerged after 1989, the state’s efforts to

control and tame market forces were likened to monumental Stalinist public works

projects that reversed the flow of rivers—examples of hubris in defiance of natural laws.3

In contrast, Western consultants and political elites throughout the region portray the

market as a positive force of nature that will help post-socialist countries to evolve into

ecologically modern capitalist democracies. Hungarian activists turn this naturalistic

metaphor on its head, lamenting the environmentally destructive qualities of “wild” or

“savage” capitalism (vadkapitalizmus).

Hungarian environmentalists believe that without the constant vigilance of

citizens, multinational capital and short-sighted local entrepreneurs will override the

common good and appropriate land, resources, and the public sphere itself for their own

profit. Writing about the shift to laissez-faire development policy, Gille states:

If state socialism was mostly characterized by power through the incalculable,

professionally ungrounded, and politically unchecked decisions of the state, the

present is characterized by what Gaventa (1980) would call power through the

“nondecisions” of a fragmented state held in check by the private sector. (Gille

2002: 155)



Contemporary environmentalists challenge the “naturalness” of the market economy not

only by demanding that the state take actions to protect the environment, but also by

challenging the underlying assumption that there are no politically legitimate alternatives

to global capitalism. In a market economy as in a centrally planned socialist system, the

environment can only be protected through the constant vigilance of citizens.

Having seen the social and environmental effects of the transformation to a

market economy, Hungarian environmental activists would probably agree with EPA

director Reilly on one thing: that the “pursuit of all-out, no-holds barred economic

development, without regard for either human or natural resources” remains a major

obstacle to sustainable development. During the 1990s, many environmentalists came to

see ecological destruction in a different light of post-socialism and globalization. A

number of research participants began to speak of vadkapitaliszmus-- “wild capitalism”--

as a source of environmental problems. The use of the term was not restricted to

environmentalists; it was part of the national lexicon of market skepticism during a time

when polls showed only 15 percent of Hungarians identifying with “liberal” attitudes

toward private property, with 40% exhibiting an “anti-capitalist” orientation (Zsolnai

1998). The pejorative use of the word vad, or “wild,” in this context deserves further

inspection, for it reveals how nature and the market were being constructed in post-

socialist Hungary.

The first sense of “wild capitalism” draws upon a variety of post-socialist

discourses on the market as a force of nature. Beginning with dissident critiques of state

socialism and Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” rhetoric, the attempts of socialist

states to transform society and the economy were portrayed as exemplars of human

artifice and hubris. This characterization is partly rooted in the Communist Party’s own



rhetoric of progress: society overcoming nature. Dissident intellectuals of the 1970s and

1980s, by contrast, drew on organic models of society as a self-organizing (önszerzöd ! )

system, an image that persists in environmental circles today. In the “triumphalist stage”

of the post-socialist transformation (Wedel 1999), Western experts and local elites

presented the twin transition of market capitalism and parliamentary democracy as the

next organisms to evolve from earlier socialist life forms. Presenting the new social order

as part of the larger natural order, they sought to legitimize policies that caused major

social and economic dislocations in people’s everyday lives.

There is a second sense to the term vadkapitaliszmus, however, in which

capitalism is not merely “wild,” but also “savage.” From the vantage point of many

Hungarians, marketization and privatization enriched a small group within society while

producing shockingly tangible social inequalities. Environmentalists, in their negative

characterization of “wild capitalism,” somewhat ironically contend that if the market is

indeed a force of nature, then it should be tamed and regulated. As suggested by the title

of a recent book by a Hungarian environmentalist, Vissza a Koszmikus Rendhez (“Back to

the Cosmic Order”), they have their own claims to organic order (György 2000).

Environmental activists offer their own alternative evolutionary theory for society:

grassroots networks of citizens pushing their way through the neglected garden of 1980s

green dissidence to demand sustainable development and global justice.

Hungarian Environmentalism and “Grassroots Globalization”

In May 2000, the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) held its convention

in Budapest. Delegates to the meeting arrived at the downtown conference site, the

ornate and beautiful Vigadó concert hall on the banks of the Danube. On this day,

however, the view of the river from the Vigadó steps was blocked by a crowd of several



hundred Hungarians gathered in the square in front of the hall. The university-based

environmental group ELTE Klub, a always a reliable troupe for street theatre, was putting

on a performance in which an activist dressed as a businessman kicked around a large

globe. Members of the Budapest Technical University’s Green Circle and the Clean Air

Action Group assembled in the square. There on the banks of the Danube, a chant rose

up from the crowd and was repeated over and over, “Re-mem-ber Se-at-tle!” (György

2000a: 1). Although not one of these activists had been physically present at the

November 1999 demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, they

“remembered” those protests as part of their own history of struggle.

Conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the mid-1990s, I observed a transformation

within Hungarian environmental activism: from the dissident-style movement of the

1980s symbolized by the Danube movement to the movement for “globalization-from-

below” that later came to be symbolized globally by the Seattle protests of 1999 and the

World Social Forum meetings. From the demonstrations against the damming of the

Danube in the 1980s, environmental protest has played a key role in Hungary’s political

life over the course of the transformation from state socialism. Environmentalism

emerged as a major dissident political force, and in the 1990s, the environmental

movement diversified to include a wide array of problems facing citizens, communities,

and environments in the wake of East-Central Europe’s entry into the global economy.

Roland Robertson describes globalization as a dual process: “Globalization as a

concept refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of

consciousness of the world as a whole” (Robertson 1992: 8). Following Robertson,

anthropologist Kay Milton suggests that anthropologists should attend to



environmentalism, both as cultural response to globalization and as a new, global activist

identity (Milton 1996).

Hungarian environmental activism in the 1990s exemplifies both aspects of

Robertson’s globalization. Targeting multinational capital’s incursions into emerging

post-socialist markets, activists respond to the political-economic compression of the

former “Second World” into the global system. Since 2000, new “alternative

globalization” organizations such as Central and Eastern Europe Bankwatch Network,

Védegylet, and Mas Világ Lehet (“Another World is Possible”) have formed to address

environmental issues, joining older environmental groups. Participating in transnational

networks and campaigns, Hungarian environmentalists increasingly think about and

experience local conditions within a global frame of reference. Remembering the

socialist past and “remembering” Seattle, they identify themselves with an

environmentalism that is global in scope and grassroots in practice.

Toward a Post-Socialist Political Ecology

[A]rticulating environmental and social change as co-constitutive moments of

transitional societies is also about constructing a theory of environmental and

social change. (Pavlínek and Pickles 2000: 30)

Since environmentalism is a social movement that conceives of social problems,

impacts, policy, and change in terms of a telescoping scale--from local to global—it

provides unique opportunities for those interested in the study of situated globalization.

Post-socialist political ecology brings together debates on civil society and

democratization, the emergence of new political identities, and anthropological

contributions to political ecology and environmental theory, three fields of inquiry I

sketch briefly here. Finally, post-socialist political ecology serves as a tool for



understanding the position of the former Second World in globalization processes and

offers the perspectives of Green activists who have “seen both sides”—that is to say, state

socialist and capitalist regimes—and are still searching for democracy, social justice, and

sustainable societies.

Eastern Europe and Civil Society Debates

Environmentalism emerged as one of Hungary’s predominant dissident political

forces in the 1980s, ushering in the political changes of 1989. “We had to become

oppositionists,” the Danube Circle’s leader, János Vargha, told me, “to secure the basic

human rights that would allow us to protect the environment.” While the political

climate has changed since the mid-1980s, Hungarian environmentalists have consistently

maintained a concern for democratic processes and the development of civil society up to

the present day.

For the environmentalists involved in the Danube movement, at least, “civil

society” meant an escape from the state’s claims to represent all of the interests of all of

its citizen-workers. Like other dissidents in Eastern Europe prior to 1989, many

environmentalists conceived of their actions in terms of civil society organizing itself

against the state (Arato and Cohen 1992, Kubik 1994, Michnik 1985). The title of one of

Vaclav Havel’s most well-known works, sums up this conception of civil society

perfectly: The Power Of The Powerless: Citizens Against The State In Central-Eastern

Europe (Havel 1985).

The limitations of this rights-based, Lockean perspective on civil society became

apparent to environmentalists as Hungary shifted to a market economy. Before 1989,

production, consumption, and institutional decision-making were all ostensibly located

within the state. After 1989, environmental activists found themselves fighting battles on



multiple fronts: against the nation-state (though not always), but also against a diverse

array of corporations and financial institutions. Over the course of the 1990s,

environmentalists continued to frame their actions in terms of “civil society,” but their

concept of civil society underwent a subtle shift from the liberalism advocated in

dissident activism to a more Gramscian notion of civil society forming a wedge between

the state and market institutions.

In their essay, “Liberation Ecology: Development, Sustainability, and

Environment in an Age of Market Triumphalism,” Richard Peets and Michael Watts

connect current debates on the nature of civil society with environmental justice struggles

around the world (Peet and Watts 1996). Contemporary theories of development develop

normative configurations of the state, civil society, and market. Like Gramsci, Peet and

Watts conceive of civil society as a participatory, mediating space between state and

market, although they acknowledge that it may equally impose strictures on individuals

(Peet and Watts 1996: 21). In the post-1989 “age of market triumphalism,” however,

civil society groups such as environmental organizations may act to protect the state’s

ability to regulate in the face of neo-liberal market ideology. In the Hungarian context,

this shift in the role of the nation-state has meant a shift in activists’ understanding of

their own political role. In this evolving perspective, activists moved from the “society-

versus-the-state” model of 1980s environmental dissidence to the more recent model of

citizen watchdogs guarding public goods from laissez-faire market exploitation facilitated

by a weak state.

Environmentalist Identities

Related to debates about the nature of civil society are issues of citizenship and

political identity in post-socialist environmentalism. A number of social identities



surface in the accounts to follow in this book. On the one hand, environmentalists

position themselves as citizens, scientists, and parents and according to age, gender,

ethnicity, and religious identity. On the other hand, many environmentalists establish

activist identities through rejecting other forms of identity, such as “consumer” or

“Hungarian nationalist.”

I explore how environmentalists in Hungary connect identity and subjective

experience with place-based politics and concern for the public sphere. In her analysis of

Slovene protests against the removal of a Baroque fountain in a public square, Veronica

Aplenc explores issues of affect, emotion, and attachment to place in civic activism

(Aplenc 2001). In a similar vein, environmentalists make subjective connections

between public spaces and events, personal experiences, and political practice by

collecting and analyzing activist biographies.

Arturo Escobar envisions grassroots environmental movements in terms of

“historical subjects struggling for the reappropriation of their natures and the redefinition

of their identities” (Escobar 1998: 388). Escobar’s work illuminates current conditions

of Hungarian environmental activism because it highlights the political struggles over

definition —the definition of social actors who can legitimately make demands for

environmental improvements, as well as the definition of resources, public space, and the

public sphere. Environmental anthropology must take into account the production of

environmental identities in settings around the world (Agrawal 2005).

Political Ecology and the Anthropology of Environmentalism

In their discourse on “wild capitalism,” Hungarian environmentalists articulate a

particularly trenchant ecological critique of the neoliberal orthodoxy that dominated the

transformation to a market economy throughout the region. Examining activists’



interpretations of the “environmental transition,” I draw from several theoretical and

methodological approaches, including symbolic ecology, historical ecology, and political

ecology. Based on my fieldwork in an urban, industrialized setting, I attempt to bring

social theories of risk into dialogue with these strands of environmental anthropology.

Anthropologist Aletta Biersack describes the transformation from early ecological

anthropology’s “New Ecology”—an approach pioneered in the late 1960s by such

anthropologists as Roy Rappaport and Andrew Vajda—to the “new ecologies” of

contemporary environmental anthropology (Biersack 2000). The “New Ecology”

ushered in a renewed interest in the material conditions of human populations inhabiting

specific environments and adapting to specific environmental niches and ecosystemic

events (Milton 1996, Biersack 2000).

The most common criticisms of the “New Ecology,” in its early incarnation, were

that it privileged a functionalist interpretation of human activities and that it marginalized

the concept of culture in its ecosystem analyses (Biersack 2000, Milton 1996). Much of

the work by ecological anthropologists in the late 1970s and 1980s attempted to resolve

these problems. Ecological anthropology developed as a theory and was defined in

relation to the key debates of anthropology in the 1970s: the extent to which nature or

culture shapes human endeavors and the question of whether materialist (often Marxist)

frameworks or idealist approaches (such as structuralism and symbolic anthropology)

should take precedence in anthropological theory (Ortner 1994). While the “New

Ecology” stood firmly in the materialist camp, the “new ecologies” outlined by Biersack

emerged out of anthropologists’ attempts to bridge the material and ideological through

an analytical focus on discourse and social practices.



Biersack contrasts the “New Ecology” with three new approaches to the human-

environment relationship, which she calls the “new ecologies”: symbolic ecology,

historical ecology, and political ecology. The “new ecologies” attempt to avoid the

“either/or of idealism versus materialism” (Biersack 2000: 7), paying special attention to

how eco-systems are shaped by our knowledge and other symbolic practices, historical

transformations, and political-economic relationships. Together with more ecosystem-

oriented approaches of human ecology, the “new ecologies” comprise a large part of the

work being done in the field of environmental anthropology.

Symbolic ecology attends to the widely varying social construction of nature

through language and symbolic practices. Scholars of symbolic ecology have studied

diverse “senses of place” and the cultural aesthetics and poetics of nature—the

“structures of feeling” associated with particular landscapes and environments (Feld and

Basso 1996, Williams 1977). Work in this field is relevant to the anthropological study

of environmentalism because it helps us understand how the “environment” is culturally

constructed as an object to exploit, protect, or preserve. Anthropologists and

environmental historians have studied how some landscapes, animal species, and other

symbols come to symbolize nature itself, while others are disregarded entirely (Einarsson

1993, Pyne 1998, Kuletz 1999). As we shall see in the case of Hungarian environmental

struggles, the success of environmentalism as a social movement depends largely upon

activists’ ability to frame environmental issues symbolically and to deploy

representations of nature and society that persuade policymakers and other citizens to

support their cause.

Historical ecology, closely linked with scholarship on environmental history,

examines how specific environments came into being. From this perspective, landscapes



and ecological relationships are cultural artifacts, or “the embodiment of past activity,” as

Tim Ingold writes (Ingold 1992: 50). In the decade following 1989, environmentalists

responded to dramatic changes in urban and rural landscapes. Urban ecologist Alice

Ingerson states:

To paraphrase Marx, people consciously make and remake urban landscapes,

starting from patterns of use and ownership not of their own choosing.

Anthropologists may be able to use “culture” to capture the conscious choices

involved in making land urban, and “political economy” to capture the unchosen

circumstances of that making. (Ingerson 2001: 245)

Historical ecology contributes to environmental theory and practice by making explicit

the social practices, political decisions, and unchosen “non-decisions” that have produced

a particular landscape. In so doing, it lays particularly essential groundwork for

understanding the political ecology of postsocialist societies.

Political ecology provides a method for studying the political economy of the

environment. Influenced by socialist critiques of the capitalist exploitation of land and

labor, political ecologists study how environmental resources and sinks are used, who

benefits and who suffers from a particular pattern of resource use, and how societies

make decisions about production, consumption, and waste that transform the environment

(Boyce 2002, Johnston 1994). Anthropologists and geographers working from the

political ecology perspective have attempted to bring Foucauldian perspectives on

discourse, governmentality, knowledge, and power in conversation with materialist

approaches to political ecology (Escobar 1999, Brosius 1999, Agrawal 2005).

Although much work in political ecology has focused on rural areas, the present

study treats urban environmental struggles within a political ecology framework. Paying



attention to urban environments requires us to acquaint ourselves with an area of social

scientific research that has until recently been ignored in political ecology: the study of

environmental risks. While rural political ecology tends to focus on issues of land

distribution and use, urban political ecology places public health, environmental risks,

and quality of life concerns alongside more traditional natural resource issues (Pellow

2002, Gottlieb 2001).

Globalization and Post-Socialist Political Ecology

While hundreds of books and articles have been published on globalization (and

on environmental movements’ role in promoting or opposing it) in the past decade,

scholars are only recently beginning to write about the post-socialist transformation in

Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union as a process of globalization (Stryker and

Patico 2001, De Soto 2000, Hemment 2004 and Dunn 2004 are notable exceptions).

Social scientists constructing general theories of globalization have, for the most part,

paid little attention to the former Second World in their attempt to understand newly

emerging linkages between the Global North and South. I believe that this is a mistake:

globalization scholars must understand the experience of Eastern Europe if they are to

grasp the political implications of the collapse of state socialism and the subsequent

devaluation of socialist projects around the world. Eastern European studies, therefore,

should continue to attend to the specific historical antecedents of post-socialist

transformations in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. At the same time, we

should not lose sight of how post-socialist societies are embedded in the larger

phenomena of globalization—of which “1989” was both a symptom and symbol.

Ethnography, as an epistemology located at the meeting point of the local and the global,



provides the ideal starting point for understanding the connections between post-socialist

transformation and globalization.

Contemporary, “post-essentialist” political ecology offers a framework for

considering symbols, discourse, and identity, as well as political, economic, and social

practices, in its assessment of human environmental transformation (Escobar 1999).

Bridging the old materialist/idealist divide in cultural theory is one of my chief goals in

developing a theory post-socialist political ecology—both for the sake of providing a

richer empirical account of the “environmental transition” and for making sense of

environmental sustainability, modernity, and social justice after the Cold War. In their

1996 essay, “From Marxism to Postcommunism,” Michael Kennedy and Naomi Glatz

urge social scientists studying contemporary Eastern Europe to act as “ridge-riders

between the social transformations of Eastern Europe and the intellectual transformation

in Marxism occasioned by them” (Kennedy and Glatz 1996: 438-39). As an

anthropologist studying post-socialist activists’ struggles to change society, I find it

doubly urgent to make sense of the transformative power of environmental movements in

a setting where many citizens (environmentalists included) quite vocally express their

exhaustion with the “radiant future” of state socialism and with utopian ideologies more

generally.

Chapter Preview

Ethnography is a critical tool for tracking how environmental issues are defined

and used and how people become environmental activists. In my research, I was

particularly interested in changes over time, as Hungary shifted from a state socialist

society to one with a democratically elected government and a largely unregulated market

economy. How did Hungarian environmentalists create a distinctive political voice for



themselves? What practices and meanings of environmental activism have held constant

over the course of the transformation from state socialism? What has changed over the

years?

The first two chapters investigate the creation of environmentalism as a social

movement and activist identity in Hungary. The first chapter, “The Making of the

Hungarian Environmental Movement,” discusses the activist narratives about the

emergence of environmental activism in Hungary. The 1980s movement against the

damming of the Danube River established environmentalism as a form of political

opposition under state socialism and is widely acknowledged as the origin point of

today’s environmental movement by both environmentalists and the general public in

Hungary. Nevertheless, activists related multiple stories about the founding of the

environmental movement that reflected their own distinct interests, locales, loyalties, and

points of entry. I examine one environmentalist’s published chronology of the

environmental movement, showing what his origin narrative reveals about struggles for

legitimacy within the movement, and what constitutes “environment,” “civil society,”

and “politics” as cultural categories at different points in time.

Chapter Two, “Chernobyl Stories and Anthropological Shock,” investigates issues

of knowledge and power in environmental struggles, presenting several stories about

health and environmental risks. The tenth anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe

generated a creative outpouring of stories about scientific knowledge, environmental

risks, and public participation. Chernobyl stories reveal twin processes in the

development of environmentalist identities, which I call the politicization of knowing,

and the politicization of caring. These stories exemplify sociologist Ulrich Beck’s



concept of “anthropological shock,” the crisis in daily life and knowledge provoked by

environmental risks.

The next part of the book moves from the theme of activist histories and identities

to consider how Hungarian environmentalists frame specific post-socialist environmental

issues. Chapter Three focuses upon activist responses to the post-socialist growth in

advertising and the introduction of global consumerism into Hungary. Many

environmentalists view the rise of consumer society as an obstacle to the development of

a democratic public sphere. They frame environmentalism as a political discourse on

citizenship, freedom of information, and public participation that is threatened by the

propaganda (advertising) and sinister motives of multinational corporations. Activists'

campaigns against advertisements and contests constitute a critique of consumer society

more generally and express activists’ fears about the commercialization of the public

sphere. I compare environmentalists’ fears about advertising as a source of propaganda

and misinformation with earlier environmental activism in the 1980s, which focused on

increasing public access to scientific studies and using scientific information to challenge

centrally planned projects. Hungarian environmentalists speak of the public sphere in

both the physical sense of public places and the more abstract sense of a public space of

citizenship and debate.

Chapter Four, “Eco-Colonialism,” introduces the theme of mounting inequalities,

exploring the appearance of a new environmental discourse in Hungary. Early in 1997,

some environmentalists began speaking and writing about “eco-colonialism,” a term

referring to East-West relationships in the political ecology of post-socialist Europe.

Because Eastern European countries are poorer and have less entrenched citizens’ action



and environmental groups than Western Europe, they are more vulnerable to

environmental exploitation.

In Chapter Five, I pose the question, “Does Everyone Suffer Alike?” Much of the

success of environmental movements hangs on the belief that everyone suffers from

environmental degradation, whether rich or poor. Hungarian environmental groups have

been particularly successful at presenting the environment as a consensus issue. Recently,

however, activists have grown increasingly aware that those who suffer most from the

increasing socioeconomic disparities of the post-socialist period are more vulnerable to

environmental degradation and illness as well. In this chapter, I describe environmental

problems facing Roma (Gypsy) communities in Hungary’s post-socialist “Rust Belt”. I

analyze some of the obstacles to building Roma-environmentalist coalitions present

activists’ recent efforts to address the social and environmental effects of the

transformation from state socialism.

In the Conclusion, I discuss how the experiences of Hungarian environmentalists

change the way we should think about social movements, the environment, and struggles

for a better world. As East-Central Europe is integrated into the European Union, global

markets, and global environmentalist networks, Hungarian activists provide a provocative

new perspective on environmental politics after the Cold War. I point to the broader

implications of the Hungarian environmental movement for the development of political

ecology.

1 The congress was coordinated with the European Marches Against Unemployment and Social Exclusion,which followed the path of European Union’s economic summits.2

Here I borrow Petr Pavlínek and John Pickles’ term.3

In fact, the very capitalist city of Chicago had a public works project in the 1870s that reversed the flowof the Chicago River, proving that ecological hubris is not limited to Stalinist planned economies (Cronon1991).

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Wild Capitalism_ Environmental Activism and Postsocialist Politic